I don't have any hard fact to back this up (not that it's required on slashdot), but I'm pretty sure funding for physics research was pretty non-existant before WW-I and almost all money went into agriculture research. After the war, military arms races in the period between WW-I and WW-II really drove the interest in public spending for research in military areas (such as radar, munitions,...) culminating in the ultimate physics experiment, the A-bomb.
In the aftermath of WW-II, public policy makers in all countries, worried about yet another war and seeing the real-world impact of esoteric physics experiments rushed to advance funding in for all sorts of physics research.
Funding of physics was never about finding a breakthrough that would impact people's lives, it is mostly about figuring things out before your enemies figured things out and gained an advantage. With the end of the cold war, the pressure is off to beat our enemies with esoteric physics so in a way we should be somewhat thankful that nobody is really pushing pushing esoteric physics anymore from a policy level. This is sadly, for you, the byproduct of the "peace-dividend".
The peace dividend factor is, however, probably only 1/2 the story.
Personally, one of the reasons I lost the desire to support the "big-sciences" is that recently, academia has decided that they aren't about "dicovery" anymore, but it all seems to be about how to "monetize" their research.
Now I'm not the type of person to deny a person the bucks that they earn, but lending money to people to buy lottery tickets and then charging me a fee for the privledge isn't my thing either.
If "big-science" wants to take public money and feed the research to the public, that's great. If a few of the researchers decided they want to leave academia to try to capitalize on their research by joining companies, that's great too. But more often these days, academic institutions have decided to "licence" their research back to companies which means they want to pick the winners and the losers. Of course nobody wants to be the loser, right, so the companies woo the people that are making the decisions and that costs money. Once the winner pays for the "license", they want to recoup their investment (who wouldn't) and indirectly we (the public) end up paying again.
That to me just sucks!
I'll gladly pay a little (in the form of taxes) and take the risk nothing comes of certain research, but when the research pays off, I really resent paying again in the form of monopoly taxes to the "winner" chosen by the academic institution.
Everytime I hear people talk about academics lamenting the fact that they have to go to get private money (e.g., corporate financing) for their projects instead of getting public money, I think to myself that there is a good case to be made that academia broke the previous contract and now are just crying over spilled milk. Academia chose their path, they have to live with the consequences.
If we were in the music business, we would call this "selling-out-to-the-man"...
You might argue that physics isn't the same as genetics or computer-science, but unfortunatly, from the generally uninformed public point of view, there's not much of a difference and the baby gets thrown out with the bath water. Just look at how research money is spent these days: "overhead" is one of the bigger ticket items in most grants. Nobody seems to want to isolate the spending on a project, but everyone wants overhead to go into a generic university "slush-fund" which gets intermingled with all that private money too. It's too hard to draw the line in most univeristy budgets on what is public and what is private (it's all just their money to spend however they want). If people thought Enron was bad, I'm not sure they'd be too pleased at the typical university accounting procedures...
If research wants to be monetized, then the money should pay for the research, right? Sadly there's not much money in physics research at the moment...
Well JPL is in Pasadena, but Ames is hit too and it's of course in Mountain View next to Google...
If we believe the nasawatch site, it seems that this RIF might be structured as a buyout (the carrot), with a later layoff (the stick). Although ususally intended to convince the high-priced old-timers to leave (to avoid the inevitable layoff), this strategy often has the unintended consequence of scaring the good people who can find better situations into taking the money and finding a better situation.
So yes, I think there's a good chance that quite a few people among those leaving were among the best and the brightest, since they are the ones with the best prospects at finding a new position and might be brave enough to take the money and take a chance at google (if they want them).
Might want to take a quick gander on how the EU is considering handling Galileo funding...
12.The Commission considers that levies on receivers and operating licence fees are further possibilities for revenue. These would need to be introduced throughout the European Community.
27.The Government believes that users will pay for a service only if it meets their requirements and if no cheaper alternative is available. The Government understands that the maritime community sees little need for a new satellite navigation system at present and that a need will continue to exist for conventional aids to navigation such as lighthouses, buoys and beacons. Therefore the possibility that certain uses of Galileo may be made mandatory to generate revenue and to make savings through the withdrawal of conventional aids is of concern. Aviation and other users may have similar concerns. Hence, the Government considers that users' requirements and benefits need greater investigation and cost-benefit analysis.
I wonder how EU-DNS will look like to EU-citizens when all the dust has settled...
All ISPs provide some sort of DNS caching servers today for their customers (otherwize their customers would complain about slow internet service which isn't the same as slow DNS, but customers don't understand the difference).
Most DNS cacheing servers managed by ISP don't answer queries from outside the range of IP allocated to their customers (trying to avoid free-loaders). In the past freeloading was common (e.g., the old UUNET dns was much better than some of the early "cheap" ISPs), but the situation has evolved to the fact that once you a committed to an ISP, you are pretty much tied to their DNS cacheing servers. Today, Different DNS servers have different quality of service and if you don't like it, your only recourse is to switch ISPs.
Of course the "root" server is that everyone is all up in a huff about is rarely hit (usually due to a type-o). And only just responds to top-level domain queries (e.g.,.com,.us,.br, etc...) and points them to a domain server authoritative for that domain. In practice, the ISPs caching DNS server never really forwards any top level requests to the root (or it would be too slow).
For example, country specific pointers...
.us - a.gtld.biz (209.173.53.162) united states (NeuStar) .br - b.dns.br.br (200.209.30.5) brazil (Comite Gestor da Internet no Brasil) .cn - dns3.cnnic.net.cn (210.52.214.84) china (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
The only question I can imagine is if there is a "credentialing" dispute (e.g., suppose there's a civil war in a country, and the "government" wanted to change the authoritative domain IP address for their top level domain, what do you do). I can't imagine this happens often at all nor that if a real dispute arose, if UN would be any better than the US at this (given any civil war related dispute would probably bubble up the the UN security council anyhow which the US has veto power on), this aspect seems like just a petty turf war that really won't affect any of the countries that are complaining (unless their intelligence services are predicting a coup d'etat) and is just posturing for the real issue...
The big beef issue is for influence of the generic top level domains. For example:
Right now, Verisign really controls this part of net-namespace and other countries can't tax this (for example, brazil can tax google.com.br, but not google.com). Nor can other countries directly stick their noses in name disputes in domains they don't have their fingers into. I imagine right now Verisign really only responds to US/ICANN pressure on name disputes and pricing/taxes), but if thier "daddy" is the UN, they'd have to kiss some other butt instead. It doesn't surprize me that everyone wants to be the "daddy" of verisign (or more specifically to fire them and hire their own son's company into that role, for example).
I believe in the US of A, your liability for fraud on CC is limited to $50, although most CC companies waive that to $0. It's a pain, but it's often okay...
However, once a phisher has enough info on you they can do things that you aren't aware of and will not catch until it's really far to late. For example, they'll go buy a used car and finance it with the used car dealer back by a credit card and then sell the car for parts. Some used car dealers take just about any credit indication (e.g., the fact that you have a credit card) because they sometimes make money by selling/repo-ing the same cars over-and-over to people that have marginal credit. They can also rent furniture, electronics, and major appliances (and resell-them), and sometimes they can open credit union accounts and write overdrafted checks which are kite-ed at pay-day-advance loan stores and so on. Of course they don't use your address and phone number on any of these additional credit applications, so it's pretty hard for you to track...
By the time you find out about all your potentially fraudulant accumulated liability, you are getting non-stop harrassing phone calls from some ABC collection agency that doesn't really care how your name got into their to-be-tracked-down-and-harrassed list. Then you spend a year cleaning up the whole mess on your credit report.
If you don't think this is possible, go into a store that usually sells/rents items to people with less than stellar credit and see if you can get store credit with only a major credit card number, a temporary driver's license (one w/o a photo), and a university id (that is trivial to forge). You may be shocked...
Actually, really this situation isn't too different to the GPS situaion...
A number of countries represented in Geneva, including Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran and several African states, insisted the US give up control, but it refused.
...the EU took a bold step and proposed two stark changes: a new forum that would decide public policy, and a "cooperation model" comprising governments that would be in overall charge.
Euros don't like US control of GPS, decide to build their own. Euros don't like US control of DNS root server, decide to build their own. What they can't do is force the US to use their root servers, take over the US root server, or force the US to use Galileo, or take over the GPS satellites. If the euros think they want this and to pay for this, well, there's not much anyone can do.
The problem for the instigators if this happens is probably the same problem that the Gallileo project currently has: Nobody wants to pay for it. So the european countries involved with the project are in the process of passing laws in their respective countries to force their citizens to use this duplicate service and to fund it with tax levies on the products. Remember in Europe, TV and Radio taxes are common, and I suspect a Internet access tax will be shortly coming to bear (to allegedly support the infrastructure)...
Here's a quick link to a short description about television taxes, maybe we should start one up for the up and coming internet access tax/license...
This is how governments really flex their muscle, they are pissed that they can't control something enough to tax their citizenry, so they interpose themselves into the loop and charge their populace for the privledge.
I for one welcome the new tax regime that will sweep the rest of the world and help hold back our economic competitors...;^)
He's not against stem cell research. He's against destroying embryos. Huge Difference
Isn't that like saying i'm not against reproduction, just against sex...
Isn't that like saying I'm not against software, just against proprietary software development? Of course GWB says he's against destroying embryos, but that isn't the same as being against research using existing stem cell lines (not particularly desired by the current academic community), or using umbilical cord stem cells (harvested after babies are born as in this case). Not saying we should or should not judge politicians on consistency (heaven knows they can't even agree on the definition of the word "is";^)
Let's google for George Papadopoulos and Dimitrios Ioannides...
Hmm, George Papandopolulus was a general that lead a coup in 1967... Strange that Dimitrios Ioannides was also a general dictator around 1973 that reignited that whole cyprus-turkey-greece thing... Also modern greece has historically been more of a groomed sucessor type of system where your last name is very important...
And don't get me started on the attempted military coup in spain in 1981 to restore the monarchy. Also, somehow the king of spain and some princess in greece are related...
Those seems like pretty significantly flawed european democracies to me (and these events didn't happen too long ago)...
Sometimes I wonder if what we really need in the world to better get along is better world history lessons (not that I claim to know much, but the more you know, the more that you know that you don't really know anything)...
I doubt europeans really have it built into them to say "let's build constitutional democracy today". Although, I'll concede that, after rome and the european monarchies, there were a few experiments...
Let's see I'm not sure if I know too much about the "british constitution", and then there was a little bit of imperialism, and France went through a few "republics", and a couple world wars, and a Marshall plan, and you know what, I guess europeans came up with a few constitutional democracies afer all of that...
It takes some time, and the Middle East may or may-not get there, but I don't know if I'd go writing them off after such a short period of time. If the world wrote off europe in the aftermath of world war II, who know what would have happened...
As for your quaint story about an ancient greek general/philosopher, isn't it the case that most of what we know about Mr. Xenophon, is what he wrote in his own "history" book. I'm positively sure he was elected using a constitutional democratic principle, like is often done with field promotions of officers in war situations to backfill for their fallen comrades. Wasn't it true that Mr. Xenophon banned from Athens after he made it back to greece? To me, reading the Anabasis seems like reading an account of the early crusades... or maybe apocalypse now?;^)
Yeah, I know the word democracy comes from greek, but I don't think the greeks even wrote their constitution until 1975...
Although I don't have any evidence (not that is required on/.), my hypothesis for the Flynn effect has always been that language is in fact improving the human ability to abstract information better than it has done in the past and will continue this improvement over time.
The flimsy basis for this argument is that when babies are young and don't know any language, memory and intelligence seem very rudimentary, but as they learn language, they gain the ability to store, categorize, recall, and cross-link concepts and ideas to form intelligent behaviors. It stands to reason that it is quite possible that the more efficient the language, even if the symbolic processing capability is constant, the more apparently intelligent the resultant behaviors can be. Language (and the ability to process more complex information) is something that is constantly developing/evolving and can do so faster and independent of other forces like DNA evolution, possibly explaining how this effect has been going on in the past and also allowing for this effect to continue for the forseeable future.
One of the leaps of faith that has to be made to adopt this philosophy is that intelligent behavior is something that is the result of language (or more generically, symbolic processing), not any "magic" phenomena of the brain that requires evolution and genetics to change. This includes not only the behavior of test taking, but the more "real-world" behavior of surviving in an increasingly complex world.
As a cheap example, the invention of a language to express numbers has allowed humans to become more intelligent in mathematics than before that improvement has occured (e.g., "one" vs "many" vs a counting system). It allows us to organize our thought about math better and allows us to exhibit seemingly more intelligent behavior about math related things.
As a possibly future example, wouldn't it be great if we had a language to communicate musical queries better than "humming" to your friend to try to get them to remember the name of a tune? Seems to me that years from now when we look back we'll see how dumb we were that we had to use humming and grunts and groans to communicate and organize our thoughts about music. What morons we are;^)
An analogous ideas is how "compression" has allowed a constant amount of digital bandwidth convey an increasing amount of information/per-unit-time, as improved compression techniques have evolved. Sometimes the improvement in compression has been low-level (oversampled uart vs binary manchester coding vs 8/10 coding vs PRML) medium level (MNP5, LZW) or high level (mpeg/jpeg video/picture compression). Even with a fixed capacity, the improvement in language has brought great increases in throughput (although improving throughput isn't the same as improving intelligence, it's still something to ponder).
This idea of evolution of language allowing improved representation of abstract ideas and resultant apparent increase in cognitive behavior has always intrigued me as I've pondered the difference between "chinese" ideographic style language vs "european" alphabetic style language. Is there any inherent advantage to either?
It's amazing how people attempt to sprinkle pejoratives into thier arguments like "slave labour" in a thinly veiled attempt to garner simpathy for their arguments by tapping into latent (or not so latent) racist sentiments.
Simply put, like the "japanese" car invasion of the seventies and eighties, the so called "first-world" is going through another "IT" invasion, this time from China and India... This time the US companies are trying a different strategy before they get pummeled (e.g. this is like AMC moving a car plant to Japan). I have no idea if this strategy will work for IBM and other IT companies, but I'm sure they are aware of what happened with the car company strategy (e.g., the K-car).
This is NOT south africa aparthid. This is NOT indonesia nike shoes. This is NOT feeding off the weak, this is a real shift in the industry not unlike shifts that have happened in the past (and will in the future).
In the narrow limited minds of Detroit in the 70's and 80's, there were often racist actions against anyone with "dark" colored skin (e.g., the horrible beating of Vincent Chin, who wasn't even japanese) as the industry shift occurs by people who enjoyed using pejoratives to garner simpathy for their arguments... I hope you aren't aligning yourself with people that have that kind of mindset...
The (unratified) global-warming pact required the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Yet, according to the Energy Information Administration, greenhouse emissions grew by 3.1 percent in 2000 alone; when Clinton left office, emissions were 14 percent higher than 1990 levels.
The latest figures from the Energy Information Administration are for 2002; they show that under the Bush administration, greenhouse gas emissions are lower -- they're 11.5 percent higher than 1990 levels. I won't credit Bush for the reduction, because the post-Sept. 11 economy was the big factor here, as the Sierra Club's Dan Becker pointed out. But if Bush truly were Satan on the environment, pollution numbers should have gone up, not down.
Of course the president can't unilaterally ratify a treaty, so maybe not all the blame goes to him...;^)
For what it's worth, I think the relocated "town" after the 1993 flood you are referring to was Valmeyer, Illinois. As I recall the population of that town was under 1,000... That would mean it's a little smaller than the BIG easy (I'm guessing about a half a million people). However, as I recall, FEMA refused to give money to people to rebuild at the old site, so they decided to move...
I guess it seems a bit severe to relocate an entire CITY, but you never know. It's not the cheapest thing to do, but it might be the most reasonable thing to do, but call it whatever you want, there's always gonna be a market for a bunch of people living at the mouth of the mighty mississippi...
Yeah, venice has got that flooding thing licked... not... I doubt any type of construction project in the gulf would stop a storm surge. About the only thing that people think would stop a storm surge is a huge tidal marsh area. The tidal marsh area that could have helped buffer the area is receding probably because all the levies that have been built to prevent flooding and the dredging. Hard to imagine a technological solution to this problem...
Seems like there are few stereo-typical comments I've seen from caltech folks complaining about the submitter's use of "Cal Tech", of course not addressing the fact that Caltech is losing a repected researcher in their center for advanced computer research...
Hopefully catlech;^) isn't all that can be said about this...:^( WHO CARES;^)
As an alum I'm a bit disappointed, although I'm not exactly surprized (at caltech, computers have always seemed more about applied science, than a science in themselves)...
French Fries to Fuel
Clark County School District, Nevada
The Clark County School District operates almost all its 1,186 buses on B20, which is a cost-effective way to improve the safety of its 246,000 students, according to district vehicle maintenance coordinator Frank Giordano. "It was our obligation to explore alternatives that would help clean up the exhaust from our diesel engines," says Giordano. "We worked with the engine manufacturer to include its new generation of cleaner burning diesel engines, and got its consent to run them on biodiesel."
Because the local area lacks a supply of soybeans, the traditional biodiesel feedstock, suppliers turned to one of the area's plentiful resources: cooking grease from restaurants and casinos. Clark County restaurants produce twice the national average of three gallons of grease per resident per year. A joint venture between Nevada-based Haycock Petroleum and Biodiesel Industries supplies the grease-based biodiesel to the school district.
If you don't believe science can be politicized, you probably are not aware of Soviet History...
To put it literaly, in Soviet Russia, genetics inherits from you! [pun intended]
Lysenko's theory of genetics was that your environment could alter your genetic constitution so that you could pass acquired traits to your offspring. This was in contrast to the Mendel theory where inherited characteristics were in-born and not affected by environmental change. Stalin loved this idea as it fit with his political agenda of "re-educating" people...
As a result Soviet biology was set back god knows how many years... Perhaps in god-less soviet russia, maybe they didn't care that god didn't even know;^)
What risk is there in US $.05 coins? They don't contain nickel--if they did, melting them down would get you more than $.05. Moreover, they'd be magnetic, like iron and cobalt. Try sticking a nickel to a magnet--it doesn't work.
I try to get my information from the most accurate sources possible...
According to this website, the US mint claims the current nickel in circulation is a cupro-nickel alloy (25% nickel with the balance copper).
Are there more accurate sources to support your claim?
According to many current theories, photons have zero rest mass, but still have momentum (another mysterious conservation book-keeping number like energy except it has the ability to describe the movement of energy from one place to another using massless photons or electromagnetic waves).
When this photon with a certain momentum strikes your solar sail, depending on the precise interaction with the matter in the sail, transfers some of it's momentum to the sail.
Which is why this whole thing makes more sense when you talk about with this type of formula...
E^2 = (m0^c^2)^2 + (p*c)^2
Assuming we aren't converting any "rest mass" to energy in the interaction, conservation of energy implies that we are going to conserve relativistic momentum and we don't get no perpetual motion machine (unless you count motion as drifting in mostly the same direction as the original photon)
Now photons (which by definition are moving and have momentum) can have kinetic energy associated with them without having to divide zero by zero (since photons travel the speed of light v/c = 1 and the denominator is zero in your equation).
Last time I checked, toyota isn't using those "extremely toxic" lead/cadmium batteries, but nickel metal hydride (which are still somewhat toxic because of the nickel, but not nearly as bad as led and cadmium, and is of a similar risk as that damn US5 cent piece and cheap costume jewelry plating)...
Is there a recycling plan in place for nickel-metal hydride batteries?
Toyota has a comprehensive battery recycling program in place and has been recycling nickel-metal hydride batteries since the RAV4 Electric Vehicle was introduced in 1998. Every part of the battery, from the precious metals to the plastic, plates, steel case and the wiring, is recycled. To ensure that batteries come back to Toyota, each battery has a phone number on it to call for recycling information and dealers are paid a $200 "bounty" for each battery.
Eventually, the batteries will go to lithium hydride, but the price and the technology isn't there yet, but is coming soon. But don't let anyone bother you with actual information, it's just to controversial to leave information in amatuer hands;^);^)....
If you haven't noticed, that un-popular country that america is using as a garbage dump is china (with all that "wonderful" toxic used computer equipment that americans seem to be fond of using).
I seem to remember that mars doesn't have a very strong magnetic field (which makes me wonder if it has something akin to a Van Allen radiation belts).
It may (or may not) be debatable if an astronaut survives a trip through earth's Van Allen radiation belts, but if Mars doesn't have anything similar to protect it against cosmic radiation, it's gonna be a bitch living on the planet for any length of time even if they do survive the trip...
I don't want to get into a particle vs wave debate, but at the energy level of gamma rays (photon-like particles), I don't think you have to worry about changing their momentum much so they "bounce" with a some weak lead shielding resulting in a ping-pong game...
If the gamma photon gets through the lead (and it usually's got lot of momentum/energy), it'll get to the person and have some probablity of hitting one of the atoms in the person (resulting in the atom decaying and causing ionizing radiation damage). Since a person is usually thicker than the shield, the probability of hitting an atom in the person's body is much higher than hitting an atom in the lead shield. For alpha and beta radiation, they are charged and also usually have lower energy/momentum and as you mentioned can be mostly stopped with thin layers of material...
And cosmic rays (which mostly originate outside the solar system, but some come from the sun) are about 10-1000x more energetic than typical gamma rays (since both cosmic and gamma rays are techically photons they are only distinguished by energy level anyhow, a rose is a rose).
As for slowing down these highly energetic photons, well, there's not much a lead plate in a space-suit (or in a space-ship) is gonna do about that. Particles with that much energy/momentum aren't easy to stop with a few inches of any material, but if a "peice of radiation decided to stop", the photon would have zero rest mass and you wouldn't notice it (except for the residual path of damage it made in the attempt to stop)...
For current astronauts "near" earth, they of course have this big shield that protects us from about 1/2 of this radiation (the technical name of the shield is called earth), for someone far away from a big planetary body to shield them, they'll get at least a double dose of cosmic rays. For those of us on earth we get protection from both the earth on one side and atmosphere on the other, but of course mars's atmosphere is thinner (and doesn't have any ozone, although there may be some other thing there that helps)...
> Thanks to the precision and accuracy of modern electronic hardware, this calculation can be accurate to within 20 meters or less.
However, while GPS is accurate to less than a meter with error-correcting commercial or military signals [the military pulled out part of the bands, those big holes you see on the spectrum map], the commercial software/hardware allowed for export outside of NATO does NOT have this accuracy.
It's usually only accurate to about 150-200 meters.
Not sure this is entirely accurate...
Certain GPS equipment is classified as a munition (e.g., one that is designed to produce location data at altitudes > 60,000ft and velocity > 1000 knots), but most commercial ones don't have the required capabilities and are usually exportable.
Also since selective availablility has been turned off (worldwide since 1998), the C/A code(the commercial one, not the encrypted military PP code) will generally give better than 40meter accuracy (average 15meters), depending of course on how cheap you are with your equipment...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have any hard fact to back this up (not that it's required on slashdot), but I'm pretty sure funding for physics research was pretty non-existant before WW-I and almost all money went into agriculture research. After the war, military arms races in the period between WW-I and WW-II really drove the interest in public spending for research in military areas (such as radar, munitions, ...) culminating in the ultimate physics experiment, the A-bomb.
In the aftermath of WW-II, public policy makers in all countries, worried about yet another war and seeing the real-world impact of esoteric physics experiments rushed to advance funding in for all sorts of physics research.
Funding of physics was never about finding a breakthrough that would impact people's lives, it is mostly about figuring things out before your enemies figured things out and gained an advantage. With the end of the cold war, the pressure is off to beat our enemies with esoteric physics so in a way we should be somewhat thankful that nobody is really pushing pushing esoteric physics anymore from a policy level. This is sadly, for you, the byproduct of the "peace-dividend".
The peace dividend factor is, however, probably only 1/2 the story.
Personally, one of the reasons I lost the desire to support the "big-sciences" is that recently, academia has decided that they aren't about "dicovery" anymore, but it all seems to be about how to "monetize" their research.
Now I'm not the type of person to deny a person the bucks that they earn, but lending money to people to buy lottery tickets and then charging me a fee for the privledge isn't my thing either.
If "big-science" wants to take public money and feed the research to the public, that's great. If a few of the researchers decided they want to leave academia to try to capitalize on their research by joining companies, that's great too. But more often these days, academic institutions have decided to "licence" their research back to companies which means they want to pick the winners and the losers. Of course nobody wants to be the loser, right, so the companies woo the people that are making the decisions and that costs money. Once the winner pays for the "license", they want to recoup their investment (who wouldn't) and indirectly we (the public) end up paying again.
That to me just sucks!
I'll gladly pay a little (in the form of taxes) and take the risk nothing comes of certain research, but when the research pays off, I really resent paying again in the form of monopoly taxes to the "winner" chosen by the academic institution.
Everytime I hear people talk about academics lamenting the fact that they have to go to get private money (e.g., corporate financing) for their projects instead of getting public money, I think to myself that there is a good case to be made that academia broke the previous contract and now are just crying over spilled milk. Academia chose their path, they have to live with the consequences.
If we were in the music business, we would call this "selling-out-to-the-man"...
You might argue that physics isn't the same as genetics or computer-science, but unfortunatly, from the generally uninformed public point of view, there's not much of a difference and the baby gets thrown out with the bath water. Just look at how research money is spent these days: "overhead" is one of the bigger ticket items in most grants. Nobody seems to want to isolate the spending on a project, but everyone wants overhead to go into a generic university "slush-fund" which gets intermingled with all that private money too. It's too hard to draw the line in most univeristy budgets on what is public and what is private (it's all just their money to spend however they want). If people thought Enron was bad, I'm not sure they'd be too pleased at the typical university accounting procedures...
If research wants to be monetized, then the money should pay for the research, right? Sadly there's not much money in physics research at the moment...
Well JPL is in Pasadena, but Ames is hit too and it's of course in Mountain View next to Google...
If we believe the nasawatch site, it seems that this RIF might be structured as a buyout (the carrot), with a later layoff (the stick). Although ususally intended to convince the high-priced old-timers to leave (to avoid the inevitable layoff), this strategy often has the unintended consequence of scaring the good people who can find better situations into taking the money and finding a better situation.
So yes, I think there's a good chance that quite a few people among those leaving were among the best and the brightest, since they are the ones with the best prospects at finding a new position and might be brave enough to take the money and take a chance at google (if they want them).
> I don't see that as likely to happen.
Might want to take a quick gander on how the EU is considering handling Galileo funding...
12.The Commission considers that levies on receivers and operating licence fees are further possibilities for revenue. These would need to be introduced throughout the European Community.
27.The Government believes that users will pay for a service only if it meets their requirements and if no cheaper alternative is available. The Government understands that the maritime community sees little need for a new satellite navigation system at present and that a need will continue to exist for conventional aids to navigation such as lighthouses, buoys and beacons. Therefore the possibility that certain uses of Galileo may be made mandatory to generate revenue and to make savings through the withdrawal of conventional aids is of concern. Aviation and other users may have similar concerns. Hence, the Government considers that users' requirements and benefits need greater investigation and cost-benefit analysis.
I wonder how EU-DNS will look like to EU-citizens when all the dust has settled...
All ISPs provide some sort of DNS caching servers today for their customers (otherwize their customers would complain about slow internet service which isn't the same as slow DNS, but customers don't understand the difference).
.com, .us, .br, etc...) and points them to a domain server authoritative for that domain. In practice, the ISPs caching DNS server never really forwards any top level requests to the root (or it would be too slow).
.us - a.gtld.biz (209.173.53.162) united states (NeuStar)
.br - b.dns.br.br (200.209.30.5) brazil (Comite Gestor da Internet no Brasil)
.cn - dns3.cnnic.net.cn (210.52.214.84) china (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
.com - c.gtld-servers.net (192.26.92.30) generic "com" tld (Verisign)
Most DNS cacheing servers managed by ISP don't answer queries from outside the range of IP allocated to their customers (trying to avoid free-loaders). In the past freeloading was common (e.g., the old UUNET dns was much better than some of the early "cheap" ISPs), but the situation has evolved to the fact that once you a committed to an ISP, you are pretty much tied to their DNS cacheing servers. Today, Different DNS servers have different quality of service and if you don't like it, your only recourse is to switch ISPs.
Of course the "root" server is that everyone is all up in a huff about is rarely hit (usually due to a type-o). And only just responds to top-level domain queries (e.g.,
For example, country specific pointers...
The only question I can imagine is if there is a "credentialing" dispute (e.g., suppose there's a civil war in a country, and the "government" wanted to change the authoritative domain IP address for their top level domain, what do you do). I can't imagine this happens often at all nor that if a real dispute arose, if UN would be any better than the US at this (given any civil war related dispute would probably bubble up the the UN security council anyhow which the US has veto power on), this aspect seems like just a petty turf war that really won't affect any of the countries that are complaining (unless their intelligence services are predicting a coup d'etat) and is just posturing for the real issue...
The big beef issue is for influence of the generic top level domains. For example:
Right now, Verisign really controls this part of net-namespace and other countries can't tax this (for example, brazil can tax google.com.br, but not google.com). Nor can other countries directly stick their noses in name disputes in domains they don't have their fingers into. I imagine right now Verisign really only responds to US/ICANN pressure on name disputes and pricing/taxes), but if thier "daddy" is the UN, they'd have to kiss some other butt instead. It doesn't surprize me that everyone wants to be the "daddy" of verisign (or more specifically to fire them and hire their own son's company into that role, for example).
I believe in the US of A, your liability for fraud on CC is limited to $50, although most CC companies waive that to $0. It's a pain, but it's often okay...
However, once a phisher has enough info on you they can do things that you aren't aware of and will not catch until it's really far to late. For example, they'll go buy a used car and finance it with the used car dealer back by a credit card and then sell the car for parts. Some used car dealers take just about any credit indication (e.g., the fact that you have a credit card) because they sometimes make money by selling/repo-ing the same cars over-and-over to people that have marginal credit. They can also rent furniture, electronics, and major appliances (and resell-them), and sometimes they can open credit union accounts and write overdrafted checks which are kite-ed at pay-day-advance loan stores and so on. Of course they don't use your address and phone number on any of these additional credit applications, so it's pretty hard for you to track...
By the time you find out about all your potentially fraudulant accumulated liability, you are getting non-stop harrassing phone calls from some ABC collection agency that doesn't really care how your name got into their to-be-tracked-down-and-harrassed list. Then you spend a year cleaning up the whole mess on your credit report.
If you don't think this is possible, go into a store that usually sells/rents items to people with less than stellar credit and see if you can get store credit with only a major credit card number, a temporary driver's license (one w/o a photo), and a university id (that is trivial to forge). You may be shocked...
The problem for the instigators if this happens is probably the same problem that the Gallileo project currently has: Nobody wants to pay for it. So the european countries involved with the project are in the process of passing laws in their respective countries to force their citizens to use this duplicate service and to fund it with tax levies on the products. Remember in Europe, TV and Radio taxes are common, and I suspect a Internet access tax will be shortly coming to bear (to allegedly support the infrastructure)...
Here's a quick link to a short description about television taxes, maybe we should start one up for the up and coming internet access tax/license...
This is how governments really flex their muscle, they are pissed that they can't control something enough to tax their citizenry, so they interpose themselves into the loop and charge their populace for the privledge.
I for one welcome the new tax regime that will sweep the rest of the world and help hold back our economic competitors... ;^)
You forgot the best part of the boston lyrics (and probably the most relavent part of this discussion)...
TAKE A LOOK AHEAD!
Making a decision based on current money or current position is a sure sign of premature-optimization...
Let's google for George Papadopoulos and Dimitrios Ioannides...
Hmm, George Papandopolulus was a general that lead a coup in 1967...
Strange that Dimitrios Ioannides was also a general dictator around 1973 that reignited that whole cyprus-turkey-greece thing... Also modern greece has historically been more of a groomed sucessor type of system where your last name is very important...
And don't get me started on the attempted military coup in spain in 1981 to restore the monarchy. Also, somehow the king of spain and some princess in greece are related...
Those seems like pretty significantly flawed european democracies to me (and these events didn't happen too long ago)...
Sometimes I wonder if what we really need in the world to better get along is better world history lessons (not that I claim to know much, but the more you know, the more that you know that you don't really know anything)...
I doubt europeans really have it built into them to say "let's build constitutional democracy today". Although, I'll concede that, after rome and the european monarchies, there were a few experiments...
;^)
Let's see I'm not sure if I know too much about the "british constitution", and then there was a little bit of imperialism, and France went through a few "republics", and a couple world wars, and a Marshall plan, and you know what, I guess europeans came up with a few constitutional democracies afer all of that...
It takes some time, and the Middle East may or may-not get there, but I don't know if I'd go writing them off after such a short period of time. If the world wrote off europe in the aftermath of world war II, who know what would have happened...
As for your quaint story about an ancient greek general/philosopher, isn't it the case that most of what we know about Mr. Xenophon, is what he wrote in his own "history" book. I'm positively sure he was elected using a constitutional democratic principle, like is often done with field promotions of officers in war situations to backfill for their fallen comrades. Wasn't it true that Mr. Xenophon banned from Athens after he made it back to greece? To me, reading the Anabasis seems like reading an account of the early crusades... or maybe apocalypse now?
Yeah, I know the word democracy comes from greek, but I don't think the greeks even wrote their constitution until 1975...
FWIW: Almost all small to medium sized hotel properties that I know about use this system...
More larger (and more expensive properties) often use the more expensive PC based version...
The main competitors to onity are vingcard, saflok and kaba-ilco, but I'm pretty sure that onity has the lion's share of the market...
Although I don't have any evidence (not that is required on /.), my hypothesis for the Flynn effect has always been that language is in fact improving the human ability to abstract information better than it has done in the past and will continue this improvement over time.
;^)
The flimsy basis for this argument is that when babies are young and don't know any language, memory and intelligence seem very rudimentary, but as they learn language, they gain the ability to store, categorize, recall, and cross-link concepts and ideas to form intelligent behaviors. It stands to reason that it is quite possible that the more efficient the language, even if the symbolic processing capability is constant, the more apparently intelligent the resultant behaviors can be. Language (and the ability to process more complex information) is something that is constantly developing/evolving and can do so faster and independent of other forces like DNA evolution, possibly explaining how this effect has been going on in the past and also allowing for this effect to continue for the forseeable future.
One of the leaps of faith that has to be made to adopt this philosophy is that intelligent behavior is something that is the result of language (or more generically, symbolic processing), not any "magic" phenomena of the brain that requires evolution and genetics to change. This includes not only the behavior of test taking, but the more "real-world" behavior of surviving in an increasingly complex world.
As a cheap example, the invention of a language to express numbers has allowed humans to become more intelligent in mathematics than before that improvement has occured (e.g., "one" vs "many" vs a counting system). It allows us to organize our thought about math better and allows us to exhibit seemingly more intelligent behavior about math related things.
As a possibly future example, wouldn't it be great if we had a language to communicate musical queries better than "humming" to your friend to try to get them to remember the name of a tune? Seems to me that years from now when we look back we'll see how dumb we were that we had to use humming and grunts and groans to communicate and organize our thoughts about music. What morons we are
An analogous ideas is how "compression" has allowed a constant amount of digital bandwidth convey an increasing amount of information/per-unit-time, as improved compression techniques have evolved. Sometimes the improvement in compression has been low-level (oversampled uart vs binary manchester coding vs 8/10 coding vs PRML) medium level (MNP5, LZW) or high level (mpeg/jpeg video/picture compression). Even with a fixed capacity, the improvement in language has brought great increases in throughput (although improving throughput isn't the same as improving intelligence, it's still something to ponder).
This idea of evolution of language allowing improved representation of abstract ideas and resultant apparent increase in cognitive behavior has always intrigued me as I've pondered the difference between "chinese" ideographic style language vs "european" alphabetic style language. Is there any inherent advantage to either?
It's amazing how people attempt to sprinkle pejoratives into thier arguments like "slave labour" in a thinly veiled attempt to garner simpathy for their arguments by tapping into latent (or not so latent) racist sentiments.
Simply put, like the "japanese" car invasion of the seventies and eighties, the so called "first-world" is going through another "IT" invasion, this time from China and India... This time the US companies are trying a different strategy before they get pummeled (e.g. this is like AMC moving a car plant to Japan). I have no idea if this strategy will work for IBM and other IT companies, but I'm sure they are aware of what happened with the car company strategy (e.g., the K-car).
This is NOT south africa aparthid. This is NOT indonesia nike shoes. This is NOT feeding off the weak, this is a real shift in the industry not unlike shifts that have happened in the past (and will in the future).
In the narrow limited minds of Detroit in the 70's and 80's, there were often racist actions against anyone with "dark" colored skin (e.g., the horrible beating of Vincent Chin, who wasn't even japanese) as the industry shift occurs by people who enjoyed using pejoratives to garner simpathy for their arguments... I hope you aren't aligning yourself with people that have that kind of mindset...
For what it's worth, I think the relocated "town" after the 1993 flood you are referring to was Valmeyer, Illinois. As I recall the population of that town was under 1,000... That would mean it's a little smaller than the BIG easy (I'm guessing about a half a million people). However, as I recall, FEMA refused to give money to people to rebuild at the old site, so they decided to move...
I guess it seems a bit severe to relocate an entire CITY, but you never know. It's not the cheapest thing to do, but it might be the most reasonable thing to do, but call it whatever you want, there's always gonna be a market for a bunch of people living at the mouth of the mighty mississippi...
Yeah, venice has got that flooding thing licked... not... I doubt any type of construction project in the gulf would stop a storm surge. About the only thing that people think would stop a storm surge is a huge tidal marsh area. The tidal marsh area that could have helped buffer the area is receding probably because all the levies that have been built to prevent flooding and the dredging. Hard to imagine a technological solution to this problem...
Seems like there are few stereo-typical comments I've seen from caltech folks complaining about the submitter's use of "Cal Tech", of course not addressing the fact that Caltech is losing a repected researcher in their center for advanced computer research...
;^) isn't all that can be said about this... :^( WHO CARES ;^)
Hopefully catlech
As an alum I'm a bit disappointed, although I'm not exactly surprized (at caltech, computers have always seemed more about applied science, than a science in themselves)...
Anyhow, just a little venting...
French Fries to Fuel
Clark County School District, Nevada
The Clark County School District operates almost all its 1,186 buses on B20, which is a cost-effective way to improve the safety of its 246,000 students, according to district vehicle maintenance coordinator Frank Giordano. "It was our obligation to explore alternatives that would help clean up the exhaust from our diesel engines," says Giordano. "We worked with the engine manufacturer to include its new generation of cleaner burning diesel engines, and got its consent to run them on biodiesel."
Because the local area lacks a supply of soybeans, the traditional biodiesel feedstock, suppliers turned to one of the area's plentiful resources: cooking grease from restaurants and casinos. Clark County restaurants produce twice the national average of three gallons of grease per resident per year. A joint venture between Nevada-based Haycock Petroleum and Biodiesel Industries supplies the grease-based biodiesel to the school district.
If you don't believe science can be politicized, you probably are not aware of Soviet History...
;^)
To put it literaly, in Soviet Russia, genetics inherits from you! [pun intended]
Lysenko's theory of genetics was that your environment could alter your genetic constitution so that you could pass acquired traits to your offspring. This was in contrast to the Mendel theory where inherited characteristics were in-born and not affected by environmental change. Stalin loved this idea as it fit with his political agenda of "re-educating" people...
As a result Soviet biology was set back god knows how many years... Perhaps in god-less soviet russia, maybe they didn't care that god didn't even know
I try to get my information from the most accurate sources possible...
According to this website, the US mint claims the current nickel in circulation is a cupro-nickel alloy (25% nickel with the balance copper).
Are there more accurate sources to support your claim?
According to many current theories, photons have zero rest mass, but still have momentum (another mysterious conservation book-keeping number like energy except it has the ability to describe the movement of energy from one place to another using massless photons or electromagnetic waves).
When this photon with a certain momentum strikes your solar sail, depending on the precise interaction with the matter in the sail, transfers some of it's momentum to the sail.
Which is why this whole thing makes more sense when you talk about with this type of formula...
E^2 = (m0^c^2)^2 + (p*c)^2
Assuming we aren't converting any "rest mass" to energy in the interaction, conservation of energy implies that we are going to conserve relativistic momentum and we don't get no perpetual motion machine (unless you count motion as drifting in mostly the same direction as the original photon)
If we are getting pedantic...
[PEDANTIC]
For things like photons that have zero rest mass
E = m0*c^2 / sqrt (1-(v/c)^2)
Doesn't work so well... By using the following:
(E^2) = (m0^2)*(c^4) + (p^2)*(c^2)
Now photons (which by definition are moving and have momentum) can have kinetic energy associated with them without having to divide zero by zero (since photons travel the speed of light v/c = 1 and the denominator is zero in your equation).
[/PEDANTIC]
Also from the toyota website...
Eventually, the batteries will go to lithium hydride, but the price and the technology isn't there yet, but is coming soon. But don't let anyone bother you with actual information, it's just to controversial to leave information in amatuer handsIf you haven't noticed, that un-popular country that america is using as a garbage dump is china (with all that "wonderful" toxic used computer equipment that americans seem to be fond of using).
I seem to remember that mars doesn't have a very strong magnetic field (which makes me wonder if it has something akin to a Van Allen radiation belts).
It may (or may not) be debatable if an astronaut survives a trip through earth's Van Allen radiation belts, but if Mars doesn't have anything similar to protect it against cosmic radiation, it's gonna be a bitch living on the planet for any length of time even if they do survive the trip...
I don't want to get into a particle vs wave debate, but at the energy level of gamma rays (photon-like particles), I don't think you have to worry about changing their momentum much so they "bounce" with a some weak lead shielding resulting in a ping-pong game...
If the gamma photon gets through the lead (and it usually's got lot of momentum/energy), it'll get to the person and have some probablity of hitting one of the atoms in the person (resulting in the atom decaying and causing ionizing radiation damage). Since a person is usually thicker than the shield, the probability of hitting an atom in the person's body is much higher than hitting an atom in the lead shield. For alpha and beta radiation, they are charged and also usually have lower energy/momentum and as you mentioned can be mostly stopped with thin layers of material...
And cosmic rays (which mostly originate outside the solar system, but some come from the sun) are about 10-1000x more energetic than typical gamma rays (since both cosmic and gamma rays are techically photons they are only distinguished by energy level anyhow, a rose is a rose).
As for slowing down these highly energetic photons, well, there's not much a lead plate in a space-suit (or in a space-ship) is gonna do about that. Particles with that much energy/momentum aren't easy to stop with a few inches of any material, but if a "peice of radiation decided to stop", the photon would have zero rest mass and you wouldn't notice it (except for the residual path of damage it made in the attempt to stop)...
For current astronauts "near" earth, they of course have this big shield that protects us from about 1/2 of this radiation (the technical name of the shield is called earth), for someone far away from a big planetary body to shield them, they'll get at least a double dose of cosmic rays. For those of us on earth we get protection from both the earth on one side and atmosphere on the other, but of course mars's atmosphere is thinner (and doesn't have any ozone, although there may be some other thing there that helps)...
Certain GPS equipment is classified as a munition (e.g., one that is designed to produce location data at altitudes > 60,000ft and velocity > 1000 knots), but most commercial ones don't have the required capabilities and are usually exportable.
Also since selective availablility has been turned off (worldwide since 1998), the C/A code(the commercial one, not the encrypted military PP code) will generally give better than 40meter accuracy (average 15meters), depending of course on how cheap you are with your equipment...